About Product Placement

Too often products are dismissed as just something there to be consumed. Their amazing back-stories—the inspiration, intent, material choices, alterations, and lessons learned—remain known only to a select few. Product Placement, a blog and series of live events, aims to change that.

The Product Placement blog captures the moment in product design, concentrating on goods and their creators. The live events, held quarterly, focus on how and why items came to be, getting practitioners and fans alike to delve into and discuss the design process.

Each Product Placement installment is oriented around a theme, and features multiple designers from a range of fields. Each practitioner gives a five-minute talk about one of his or her products, touching on its development and the inspirations behind it—anything from a picture, a slide, or a physical prototype to a fabric’s texture, a piece of music, or a smell. After each presentation, audience members have a few minutes to ask questions. Participating designers have included Masamichi Udagawa, co-founder of Antenna Design and winner of the 2008 National Design Award for product design; Ecco Design principal Eric Chan; Barry Richards for Rockwell Group; wallpaper and textile duo Twenty2; rugmaker Amy Helfand; fashion designer Tom Scott; furniture maker Jeff Miller; and Carnegie Fabrics creative director Heather Bush, among others.

Product Placement was founded by Kimberly Oliver and Julie Taraska. Contact them at thisisproductplacement@gmail.com.

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Kimberly Oliver works with both emerging and established designers and retailers to strategically raise awareness of their businesses. She has been in the design industry since the early 1990s, when a job at an architecture firm in San Francisco led to a marketing role for a Herman Miller dealer (where she fell deeply in love with the work of Charles and Ray Eames). In 2002, Kimberly moved to New York for the launch of Vitra’s retail presence, then spent two years with Design Within Reach before launching her design marketing/PR consultancy, AmericanSuccessMachinery. She has publicized and produced numerous events, including ICFF offsites Joint Venture, Living Spaces, and Firstop: Williamsburg Public; she also was a founder and co-curator of the sustainable design exhibit HauteGREEN. After rejoining DWR in 2007, she spent two years managing the company’s public relations before leaving to head the New York office for Camron, the London-based design and lifestyle PR firm. Kimberly was born and raised in rural Maine, and has a B.A. in Sociology from Vassar College. She lives in New York.

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A contributing editor to Metropolis and Interiors, Julie Taraska can thank the Sex Pistols for her career, as it was after winning a fellowship to study British punk that she moved to London and began writing professionally. Products, emerging designers, sustainability, and travel get her jazzed, topics she also covers for the New York Times, Wallpaper*, Wired, Fast Company, and Azure. She’s held senior editorial positions at Metropolis, where she developed the company’s Web site into a standalone publication, and Home, where she made green design palatable to a mass audience; she’s also a contributing editor to four books. She holds an M.A. in Culture, Globalization, and the City from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a B.A. in European Cultural History from Connecticut College. She lives in New York.